Robert D. Austin Fellow

Robert D. Austin is a Fellow of the Cutter Business Technology Council, Director of the Cutter Innovation practice and contributes to Cutter's Business-IT Strategies, Enterprise Risk Management & Governance, Innovation, and Measurement and Benchmarking practices. Dr. Austin is a regular speaker at the annual Cutter Summit and is a former editor of Cutter Benchmark Review .

Professor Austin has been a professor at the Harvard Business School since 1997, where he has taught subjects such as economics, financial reporting, IT, and operations management to MBAs and executives. He chairs the school's executive program targeted at Chief Information Officers and teaches the IT module in the program for owner managers. Currently, he serves on the advisory boards or boards of directors of several IT industry firms, and he advises major corporations worldwide. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Dr. Austin was a technology manager at the Ford Motor Company.

Professor Austin's research deals with IT management and, more generally, on management of knowledge-intensive activities, with a particular focus on innovation. During the past four years, Professor Austin and Professor Richard Nolan (University of Washington Business School) have studied the evolution of the Internet interviewing Internet pioneers and innovators. Their research is aimed at answering the question, "Why did it take nearly three decades for the Internet computing paradigm, based on collaborative networks of interconnected computers, to emerge prominently into the business world?" and "Could this happen again? Is it happening?" They are co-chairs, along with Ed Lazowska (University of Washington) of the annual Seattle Innovation Symposium. During the 2005/2006 academic year, Professor Austin served as a visiting scholar at Copenhagen Business School, conducting research on innovation.

Dr. Austin is coauthor, with Cutter Senior Consultant Lee Devin, of Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work, the groundbreaking management book that explains why and how the metaphor of directing a theatre ensemble offers a powerful new approach for innovating by iteration and introduces a collaborative model for strategy formation, product development, and other creative business activities that the typical "supervising the factory floor" management model of cannot achieve.

Dr. Austin is author or coauthor of four other books: Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations; Creating Business Advantage in the Information Age (coauthored with Lynda Applegate and Warren McFarlan); Corporate Information Strategy and Management (also coauthored with Applegate and McFarlan); and The Broadband Explosion (coedited with Stephen Bradley). He earned his doctorate in management and decision sciences from Carnegie Mellon University, where his dissertation received the Herbert A. Simon Award. He holds a master's degree in industrial engineering from Northwestern University and bachelor's degrees in engineering and English literature from Swarthmore College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi.

For more by Robert D. Austin see:

• Innovation: The New IT Mandate
• The Future of IT Value Creation in a Global Economy

Summit 2007 Keynote: Learning from Expert Innovators Around the World

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